


The Ann Walker Diaries

by Woollymitts



Category: Gentleman Jack (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-08
Updated: 2019-10-25
Packaged: 2020-08-13 06:37:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20169787
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Woollymitts/pseuds/Woollymitts
Summary: When not transcribing Anne Lister’s diaries, this is the sort of silly nonsense I write to amuse myself. Most references are actually true.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Recently a slim volume was found in the upholstery of an old chaise that was being refurbished in Shibden Hall. On further examination, it has been announced that the work is the lost diary of Ann Walker. An extract of which is below

**14th April 1832**

Miss Lister came to visit today. I made an witless fool of myself conversing inanely about how we had met previously. She does not remember but is too polite to say so.

We had the most pleasant afternoon talking about all manner of things. From the mountains in the Alps she has climbed to her studies of the human body in Paris. I would not care to examine the things she has seen and touched for fear of one of my dizzy spells coming on.

I did at one point feel the strangest palpitation of my heart which was curious as I had not at all exerted myself since a short walk in the morningand was only sitting in the drawing room gazing upon Miss Lister. She does seem to have the most compelling eyes and radiant smile that makes her whole demeanour give the impression that I’m her only real concern, despite our being only very recently re-acquainted.

She stayed so long that James came in with the tea tray and he had burned the muffins again. Miss Lister recommend a toasting fork of her own design, which she hopes to take to Mr Parker.She claimed it is an ingenious device in an iron box that can be put on a range or in the fireplace. It is apparently possesses a clockwork mechanism and is able to toast any muffin admirably with a small bell to ring to advise the servants of its readiness.

I said I would very much like to make an order of one should she ever make it to manufacture. She seemed most pleased with my interest in her project but insisted that I should not purchase one but it would be gifted me. I responded that I could not think of anything to repay so generous a gesture but she told me quite firmly that she would think carefully upon it and would in due course suggest a fair exchange.

After her departure, I stared out at the garden window for reasons I cannot now recall.

**29th April 1832**

Catherine’s maid sent over a number of valises today for our trip to the Lake District. We are to use my carriage as she and the Priestlys say it is the most comfortable conveyance for our journey and that I could spare the groom and driver.

It is another week until the trip and I have not even thought about what I should pack for such a long expedition. Miss Lister has kindly lent me a number of guides to the area as well as some other lighter works for my leisure time.

She particularly recommends an author by the name of Brantome.He was an abbot in France some three hundred years ago so I was sure that what he would have to say was morally inspiring. As I was feeling some anxiety due to the arduousness of the trip, I turned to its pages for encouragement.

It is the most curious work titled, _The Lives of Gallant Ladies. _One chapter covers the question of whether a wife who loves another woman, commits adultery against her husband. It is apparently a question that troubled a number of Roman writers, so I can only presume it is of some importance. His conclusion was that it did not, but I was a little confused as to his reasoning. This is maybe because my French is poor and it seemed halfway through the chapter to revert to its original language.

I think Miss Lister is quite the cleverest woman I have met to be able to follow such complex philosophical ideas, so I shall fall in with her opinion and tell her I found the work very enlightening, although I did not understand half of it.I hope this will please her, as I do so like to see Miss Lister smile.

Fortunately, there was a little Italian and I was able to decipher in it that referred to acts of “_Donne con Donne _that occur, even in the present times”, which I took to mean reading to each other, sketching one another and other typical day to day activities women do together. So I will tell her, without hesitation, that it was the most illuminating book and I wholeheartedly agree with her high opinion of it. 

Miss Lister says when I return from the Lakes she will take me into her new shrubbery in Lower Drip Ing, so that I might experience the cosiness of her “chaumiere”. It is apparently a thatched hut that she has arranged most pleasingly and thinks I might take equal enjoyment in it.

I can barely wait for the day to come.

**28th May 1832**

Oh my!

[Editor’s note: there follows a series of letter that have currently no scholar has been able to decipher. Lister experts have confirmed that the cipher seems to be of Ann’s own invention and bears no resemblance to Lister’s own code. For the sake of completeness I have included the extract which follows:

🎩🌳🌳🌳🏕🌳🌳🌳🔥🛋🎩👄👄🎩🏠🎩💋🧙♀️😱🤬😂🤣🤣😂🎩🛏🧣👢🍒🤭👛👇🏻💥💥💥💥👛💦💦💦💤💤👛👅💥💥💥🌊🌊🌈🌈🌈🎩⏱📜✒️

ggggnnnhgfatgbko [Editor’s note: there follows a degradation in writing as to make the next two sentences indecipherable]


	2. May 1st 1834

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a reponse to a tumblr comment by @cynicalrainbows which set off a terrible train of thought that started growing arms and legs

**May 1st 1834**

  
This morning I was rather crossish with my wife. I was awoken by her at 5 50/60 by the sound of Anne tapping the barometer in her study next to our bedroom in her night shift.

When she returned to our bed, I thought I might practise a little of the French vocabulary she had taught to me, so I told her that “I was in the mood for ‘une petite morte’”. I might have been biting my lip or may have swallowed the last consonant in plucking up the courage to be so brazen in my request, as she placed her hand to my cheek and murmured in my ear that I did feel a little warm and was I ‘a little thirsty?’ Emboldened, I said she was quite correct in this assumption and that I did indeed have a terrible and possibly insatiable thirst that required immediate quenching, I blush now at how direct I was to her.

  
Then, she got off the bed with alacrity and rushed out of our bedroom, only to return a short while later, fully-dressed with a cup of tea in her hand. She had had Cordy make it for me and told me I should rest until my “maud”ling state had passed and I was tolerably better, while she went out with the men to complete the terracotta loggia she was building in the west wing of the hall. I lay back on the embroidered bolster with the china cup feeling quite defeated and would have thrown it against the window if she had not immediately left the room while inspecting her pocket-watch.

  
Clearly, I would have to not only be a little braver but also more than explicit in my wishes. I would spend the morning in Shibden’s library reading Anne’s anatomy books if that was what it would require. After a short and unsatisfactory nap, I called for Eugenie to dress me. Two hours and a half later, I went down to find all the family at breakfast.

  
Marian was looking askance at one of the dishes that Joseph had brought. When she enquired, Joseph responded that the contents therein was Auchmithie smoked haddock, and that Miss Lister had especially requested it. As Marian was in the middle of commenting that “THIS Miss Lister did not care for the terrible odour it put around the house,” Anne strode in from the hall with her cravat askew and lime mortar upon the end of the nose and more than a little unkempt from a morning’s labour. Marian then began to remonstrate with her for her odd appearance at a meal time. Anne refused to agreeabilise with her sister and told her that she was famished and was more than ready to enjoy the fashionable repast that Lady Gordon had kindly sent to her from Fyvie Castle, to which Marian retorted that no matter how fashionable it might be, it might very well have been smoked “on day of the very foundation of Fyvie Castle, the stench it emitted”. At this point, Anne put a rather large amount of it on my own plate without asking me my opinion, and continued to bicker with her sister. I, meanwhile, pushed it around my plate, and when neither were looking offered enough tidbits to Argus, who had taken up his usual post under the table beneath my feet, so as to have looked like I had eaten enough to form my own opinion upon the dish which of course neither sister thought to enquire of me being so engrossed in their own fixed ideas on the meal addition. I ate a little bread and waited for an appropriate time to abscond to the library.

  
As I looked over her books, I formulated a plan upon how to get my wife’s attention. She was upstairs in her study writing in her diary when I interrupted her. We talked over her medical text books and I said a little about how I was interested in the metabolism of the human body and that there appeared to be a number of ways in which to improve one’s metabolic progression without an undue strain on one’s back. Her exertion in observing and participating in the rendering of the loggia a salmon colour seemed, for example, to have energised her considerably. I made a remark about how this higher pitch in her usual vivacity had beguiled me. She then hummed and hawed a little and closed her diary (a good indication that I was hitting my mark) and said that I was quite the most curious student and would I have an opinion about this in the new buttery she had had recently made.

  
It being a quiet afternoon and Joseph was attending to the horses and Cordy having gone into Halifax, it was unlikely that the servants would arrive in that room at any untimely hour, so I acquiesced that I might have more than a little to say in or about the buttery. Taking my hand with her usual firm grip, she led me excitedly down the stairs almost stumbling into the new completed room and locked the door.

  
At the buttery windows she turned me about to face away from her and put her hands on the fabric of my dress just beneath my stays and upon my hips. She whispered into my ear and told me she was going to make a quite radical decision but required my own counsel if she was to be very sure of its rightness. At this point, I congratulated myself on the steps I had made in conveying my own desires to my wife. She directed my eyes to the opposing wall and then asked me if I would consider the salmon-coloured render also appropriate for the buttery walls.

  
I write up this entry while sitting on our bed in the mid afternoon with the dog at my feet. Anne is still knocking on the bedroom door trying to coax me out. Frankly, the only warm body I shall permit near me for the rest of the day belongs to Argus.


	3. Live we our day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In celebration of another submission to WYAS here’s another little piece from AW’s point of view that sat in my drafts for a while. I wanted to achieve a couple of things:
> 
> 1 Reflect on what a super nerd AL is and how she used the classics to seduce the ladies. I’m using one of my favs from Catullus (the translation is one from Richard Francis Burton which I have rewritten a tiny bit for modern understanding). Gosh I wish some in the 1990s had recognised reciting Latin poetry was the ultimate in lesbian game, but sadly no, so living through AL. 
> 
> 2\. To work in an expression that AL used in her diaries that stopped me in its tracks when I transcribed it today.

I had barely seen Anne today. It had not ceased raining all the day. With Marian at Market Weighton and Aunt and Anne’s father in their rooms, the only person I have spoken to since breakfast was Cordingley and only to ask her if she might not serve mutton tonight. 

Dinner was late again as Anne insisted she finish her interminable conversation with Mr Holt about the Listerwick pit. For an hour and a half they spoke of long goits and corves and other mining minutiae. 

I suppose I should be glad that the only work I needed to turn my mind to is improving my French. While we were having coffee in the library, Anne queried my progress and asked me to demonstrate by reading out loud to her from Rousseau. I started, a little slow and haltingly at first, but gradually my self-consciousness faded and I read with more fluency, or so I thought, until I caught her movement from the corner of my vision. 

I saw her twitching, her foot tapping lightly against the ottoman in some agitation it appeared. 

“Is it my pronunciation?” I bit my lower lip in frustration. I had hoped for a harmonious evening but the rain rattling against the leaded panes and the howling wind seemed to be only multiplying a gnawing irritation. 

“What? what?!” Anne was rubbing her thumb along her own lip when my comment startled her out of her distraction. 

I put down the pages and sighed, “this is unprofitable, and you, Anne, are hardly paying any attention”

“But I am” she countered. 

“Honestly, Anne, do you have to contradict me at every turn? It makes me feel so, so...” 

Despite my justified irritation, I could feel the tears rising, though I try to swallow them and tamp down welling emotions that threatened to engulf me. I would never succeed in mastering French to the degree of facility she exhibited and to do so with her elan seemed so impossible as to be almost not worthy the effort. 

“You sit there fidgeting, ready to be off, and barely heeding what I am reading aloud to you, at your request, might I add...”

I looked down at the pages of Rousseau and the words began to swim out of focus. My mood was unravelling, all the small disappointments of the week piled up and added a further weight to my resentment. 

Anne gently removed the book from my hands and looked up at me. She seemed stricken, less with remorse, but instead a sly amusement, which made me even more vehement.

“What was the last few lines about, Anne?” 

She covered her embarrassment with a “hmmm,” holding out for time and the grandfather clock in the hall chimed the late hour while I waited for her response.  
Since arriving, I’ve noticed that the dominant chime is out of tune but no one else seemed to be perturbed by it. All the day, as it struck the quarter hour, its clanging irked me. Now its dissonance seemed to reflect our own; imperfect and unresolvable. I waited for it to strike ten before half-stumbling over my angry speech, loathing myself more for my inarticulate passion, although I had practised the words in my head all day, and it tumbled out in stops and starts. 

“I will not be patronised on our travels Anne...You, you, may wish to have me under your authority at all times but it will not do for you to undermine my efforts...if, if it fails to suit either your convenience or your comfort.” I swallowed, upset that my wavering voice had muddied my resolve. 

“Since I have moved into Shibden, there has not yet been a harsh word spoken between us, but...more from my forebearance at your constant racing about the estate paying me some mind, but of the most perfunctory kind.”

I subsided into silence, all the other arguments I had carefully martialled disintegrating. How she has been affectionate but, at other times, it is been her absence that has been my greatest disappointment. How I have tried to mould myself to best suit her requirements, as a companion and as her wife, but the rate and time to which she attends to business and the work of the estate has been out of keeping with her promises of companionship and my own expectations. 

I sniffled and wiped my nose that was beginning to run, willing the tears that stood big in my eyes not to fall. 

She took my left hand and ran her thumb over the onyx of my wedding band, almost apologetically, as she explained, 

“I was not listening, my sweet darling, because I was noting how well you took on my advice from our last lesson together. “

“That to the ear the French language sounds authentic only  
if one moves one’s mouth, tongue and lips with the same natural vigour and expressivity of the native speaker, And, in that, you shewed yourself inordinately accomplished. Actually, to the point that it took my mind,” she coughed before concluding, “elsewhere.”

“And this ‘elsewhere’? Not the planed boulevards of Paris...”  
I was still wary but acknowledged she had charmed me out of churlishness, if only faintly. She got up, and walked over to a section of books that sat behind glazed doors. 

Opening one of the walnut-framed panes, she scanned the shelves looking for a particular volume, she added. “You take me to this place” On finding it, she quickly flicked through the leaves of the book, and holding it before her, began to recite the following in her low careful voice, though she seemed to have already conned it as she barely looked down upon the text, staring instead at me until I blushed under her unwavering gaze. 

“Vivamus, mea Lesbia, atque amemus,  
rumoresque senum severiorum  
omnes unius aestimemus assis!  
soles occidere et redire possunt;  
nobis, cum semel occidit brevis lux,  
nox est perpetua una dormienda.

da mi basia mille, deinde centum,  
dein mille altera, dein secunda centum,  
deinde usque altera mille, deinde centum;  
dein, cum milia multa fecerimus,  
conturbabimus illa, ne sciamus,  
aut ne quis malus invidere possit  
cum tantum sciat esse basiorum.”

And then she closed her volume and sat next to me on the small sofa. She noticed I was trembling a little and still praying the tears not to come. Anne reached behind her for the tartan throw and carefully wrapped it around my shoulders. Then placing her hand in a placatory fashion with my own and taking our entwined fingers she transferred them to her lap. 

“I came up with a loose translation into English that takes much of the spirit of its sentiment and also retains a sense of the rhythms of the original poem. I could not help but recall it as you read to me.”

She bounced my hand a couple of times upon her knee, after a proprietary fashion, before she recited again from memory,

“Love we, my Lesbia!, and live we our day,  
While all stern sayings crabbed sages say,  
At one cent’s value let us price and prize!  
The suns can westward sink again to rise  
But we, extinguished once our tiny light,  
Perforce shall slumber through one lasting night!

Kiss me a thousand times, then hundred more,  
Then thousand others, then a new five-score,  
Still other thousand other hundred store.  
Last when the sums to many thousands grow,  
The tally let's confuse till no more we know,  
Nor envious sprite in spite shall e’er believe us  
Knowing how many kisses have been kissed between us.”

She then slipped onto the small  
footstool, whereon I had placed my slippered feet and from this prone position regarded me with an adoration I found scarcely credible. I thought she recognised my scepticism in my heightened colour and querulous eye upon her. 

“I forget sometimes that I can be, well, hmmm,”

For someone so articulate it was rare to find her floundering but finally, after a short while  
of opening and closing her mouth, she fell upon a word,

“impossible”

I feel a bubble of amusement hiccup out of my full breast. So quickly did she draw me out of miseries for which she herself was partly responsible. 

“Well, Anne,” said I, “Let me see what I can do to replenish our  
supply,” as I bent down toward her upturned face, our disagreeables quite forgot.


End file.
